Ayer paragraph 7 text and suggestions

"These considerations dispose of the argument from religious experience, which many philosophers still regard as a valid argument in favour of the existence of a god. They say that it is logically possible for men to be immediately acquainted with God, as they are immediately acquainted with a sense-content, and that there is no reason why one should be prepared to believe a man when he says that he is seeing a yellow patch, and refuse to believe him when he says that he is seeing God. The answer to this is that if the man who asserts that he is seeing God is merely asserting that he is experiencing a peculiar kind of sense-content, then we do not for a moment deny that his assertion may be true. But, ordinarily, the man who says that he is seeing God is saying not merely that he is experiencing a religious emotion, but also that there exists a transcendent being who is the object of this emotion; just as the man who says that he sees a yellow patch is ordinarily saying not merely that his visual sense-field contains a yellow sense-content, but also that there exists a yellow object to which the sense-content belongs. And it is not irrational to be prepared to believe a man when he asserts the existence of a yellow object, and to refuse to believe him when he asserts the existence of a transcendent god. For whereas the sentence ‘There exists here a yellow-coloured material thing’ expresses a genuine synthetic proposition which could be empirically verified, the sentence ‘There exists a transcendent god’ has, as we have seen, no literal significance."

Ayer para 7

He begins this paragraph with the assertion that he has ‘disposed of the argument from religious experience’ on the basis that any assertions arising out of said experience would be unintelligible because they would derive from ‘intuition.’ Since he does not regard intuition as a ‘genuine cognitive state’ and it reveals no ‘facts’ then all we can actually learn from the experient’s experience is about ‘the condition of his own mind’  and no ‘intelligible propositions at all.’

            He makes the distinction between those ‘philosophers’ who don’t see a problem with believing equally the claims of the man who sees a yellow patch and yet who also claims to have seen God. He himself doesn’t think it is irrational at all to believe the former and doubt the latter. They are not the same kind of claims.

He goes on the kind of assertions made about a transcendent being have no ‘literal significance’’ unlike any that may be made about ordinary objects, a pink bus, a purple elephant etc all are ‘empirically verifiable.’

It is the fact that the person who is making the claim is not just saying that they have had this unusual experience but above all are claiming that it is of a ‘transcendent being’ and that therefore this being exists. If they could just make the first claim all might be well but to make the second is not a ‘genuine synthetic proposition’, cannot be verified and is above and beyond the range of the actual experience.

An equivalent might be those strange Americans who believe they have been abducted by aliens. They seem pretty convinced but…

Clarifying of concepts:

• Has religious experience as an argument been disposed of?
• Believing people’s claims
• Differences in the nature of the claim
• ‘no literal significance’?
• Religious language –verification principle – take issue with what kind of assertions Ayer considers ‘verifiable’ and mention those that Ayer wouldn’t consider but which we woud definitely think significant.

Swinburne’s principles of Credulity and Testimony

Is cognitive the only ‘meaningful’ aspect of life?

Ayer as dogmatic as those he criticises

Doesn’t he contradict his own claim in paragraph 1?

Remember what is Ayer actually trying to say? Or claim? Isn’t his own claim that ‘these statements are of no literal significance’ just as meaningless?

And remember Bertrand Russell (LP) who refused to even sit down at the chessboard? (an analogy – to the debate being pointless)

And what have other people said that may have a bearing or comment on his views?